Using an Online Savings Calculator Adds Up to Common Sense

Personal finance is always an important issue in our homes, as how well we run our financial affairs dictates, to some extent, how we can look after ourselves and our families. There are many online resources now available for people to achieve greater accuracy with their financial forecasting and one such resource is the online savings calculator that you’ll see on finance sites.

LowerBills, for example, has a great savings calculator that can help give a guideline to your short, medium and long-term savings goals, when you make additional investment contributions to the lump sum you already have saved. Whether you need to save up for a big holiday in a year’s time or a deposit on a house in 5 years time you can find the calculator of use.

It works by you keying in the total initial investment, the interest rate, the period of investment in years, the additional contributions and the frequency of these contributions. It will then calculate the total investment return and the total contributions you will have to make. The interest calculator will tell you the total interest you earned on your investment over the given period. The results can be printed out so that you can add them to your files.

For people who have invested a lump sum into a savings account and need an at-a-glance calculation of the total value of an investment over a period of years, this savings and interest calculator is a simple way to find out, but please note that it takes the interest rate as constant, which will not be the case if your sum is invested at a variable rate.

On LowerBills there is also an interest savings calculator that specifically allows you to measure how much interest you can save by making additional payments to your home loan. This may help to change your financial priorities if, instead of saving money as a fixed sum, you use it to increase payments on your mortgage.

These savings and interest calculator systems, when used in conjunction with other calculators allowing you to measure payments on home and car loans, for example, can help you budget much more effectively. The information can be transferred to your private spreadsheets so that you know exactly what’s coming in and going out each month. Good budgeting is the key to smart personal finance.